Thankful And A Little Sad

Holy cow. I have spent the last solid hour crying my eyes out. I mean really crying my eyes out. I was going from blog to blog and found my way over to a family's blog dedicated to their son Parker who was battling leukemia. I won't go into the details, you'll have to read about him if you want. I don't want to write about what I read because it'll just get me crying again.

But this really got me thinking about how fortunate my munchkins are and how much I love each one of them. God forbid anything were to happen to them, I would be beyond devastated. This also got me thinking about people in the medical profession who can work with children going through this. They really are blessed. It definitely takes an extremely strong person to go into that field to begin with, but to work with these kinds of patients or when the child dies... Good lord... To deal with death is one thing but to deal with such a young death. Sigh...

That blog also got me thinking about the deaths in my family and how I handled them. Most of the time, I do well, but they have never been anyone like a sibling or a very young person, or a parent. I look at death as a part of life. I really do. At my grandmother's funeral I was the one who got my brothers and my cousin laughing while standing at the casket. My aunt was not amused. I told her that while I would miss her terribly, I refuse to be sad for her. She lived to 92, got to know her great grandchildren and had a wonderful life. While standing at the casket I reminded my brothers and my cousin about how she used to like to freak us out with the veins on her the back of her hands. I touched the spot on her hand which was then too smooth and said, 'look now she can make the vein go down without trying.' They looked at me like I was insane for moment, but it got them laughing. Then I started telling the jokes she used to tell us all the time. Then they started chiming in on the funny things they'll remember. For me that was a far better way to honor her life than sitting there bawling my eyes out and asking God, "WHY?!" She would have actually been pretty peeved about seeing that.

Then I got to thinking about one of the strongest people I've ever heard of, who coincidentally, happened to be a nurse, Aaron's Mom.

I unfortunately never got the chance to meet her. She passed away in 1994. Mrs. Krulik went to nursing school during an unfortunate time when AIDS was just beginning to make itself known and unfortunately, people would get stuck with needles all the time. It's believed she most likely contracted the disease around this time. She did not know about it for an extremely long time. By time she realized something was not right and got tested, the disease had progressed to AIDS. She died approximately two years after the diagnosis.

Anyway, she worked full-time until she got her diagnosis, meanwhile, she raised three kids as a single Mom (Aaron's parents divorced when he was really little) and even helped with the the Boy Scout troop and summer camp. She was a tough-as-nails lady who was into horror movies, art and Elvis. From what I hear, she was a fighter and a half who even told death to fuck off. I'm not kidding. During one of the hospital visits she told Aaron and his siblings that a woman in white, who she had never seen before, came into the room with a wheelchair in the middle of the night and told her, 'I'm here to take you, get in. It's time to go.' When she asked her what she was talking about, the lady replied, 'You need to get in the wheelchair, I'm here to take you. You need to come with me." At this point she said she got a bad gut feeling and asked the woman in white, "who the fuck are you?!" The person just repeated herself about having to go with her. Mrs. Krulik told her, "Go fuck yourself. I have kids to take care of. I'm not going anywhere!" The woman left but returned a short time later. Mrs. Krulik told her again to go fuck herself and to take the woman who was worse off next door!

Aaron and his siblings tried to find out who went to get his mother. The staff told them that no one would have scheduled for her to be moved in the middle of the night. Mrs. Krulik never saw the nurse again, but Aaron and his siblings pretty sure their mother did indeed tell death to fuck off, twice.

I still wish I could have met her. Aaron says she probably wouldn't have liked me much at all, at the start since I'm not Jewish. He actually seems to think she probably would have scared the hell out of me, which is probably true, but that she would have tolerated me and perhaps our similarities would have eventually won her over. His uncles, her brothers, seem to think she would have actually liked me a lot. Either way, I still wish I could have met the woman.